My comments may not sit well some on FR - but here goes anyway.
I am not in disagreement with some of what Maxine Waters is talking about. I’m speaking from a Minnesota perspective of course. Our state GOP database is crap. A few years ago, I wrote a letter to the state chair, advocating a number of changes.
I suggested that we start ID’ing voters by race. Is Voter A a black guy? Is Voter C an Hispanic woman? If they are, code ‘em as such. Based on demographic trends, that’ll label them as a Democrat voter. Now I am painting a broad brush here. Not all Hispanic women are gonna vote Democrat - but the vast majority of them will.
Let’s start ID’ing voters by whether they were a veteran. Now obviously not all veterans are gonna vote GOP but a majority of them will.
Let’s start ID’ing voters by religion. Obviously, an evangelical is strongly likely to vote GOP whereas an ID’d Catholic may be hit or miss.
There are lots of other ways to ID potential voters. But what we truly need is a well-oiled database where we can identify potential GOP voters and tailor a message to them that will m ake them vote OUR way.
For those of you on the civil libertarian side, let’s be clear. I’m not advocating a database in which we know how much credit card debt a Ronald Smith in Frankfort Kentucky has or what kind of underwear a Kathy Smith in Frankfort Kentucky wears. That kind of info is useless.
I think we could start winning more elections if we truly know who our voters are. It’ll take a lot of leg work and truth be told, we won’t be able to identify every potential GOP or Dem voter - but it’s a start that we should consider.
Interestingly, it has been reported that the Obama campaign cross referenced their voter database with commercial data of the sort you describe. Apparently they discovered correlations between various purchases and whether an individual was likely to vote for Obama. None of the data is useless.
They also used "survey" calls to see if their messages were working with groups of targeted voters. And they adjusted the "message" until it worked - even if that included telling some huge whoppers!